President Donald Trump sings the national anthem during a “Celebration of America” event on the south lawn of the White House on June 5, 2018, in Washington, D.C. The event was originally intended to honor the Super Bowl champions the Philadelphia Eagles.
Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Faced with the embarrassment of his poorly attended ceremony to honor Super Bowl champions the Philadelphia Eagles, President Trump announced that he was inviting the team’s “fans” to a display of patriotism instead. The president “believes there is a significant overlap between football fans and his base and has told confidants that he believes his voters would enthusiastically take his side over football players whom Trump thinks have looked unpatriotic and greedy,” the Associated Press reports.

Even by the standards of a hastily devised event, it was a shambolic display. If the plan was to prove that Eagles fans would side with Trump over the Eagles, there is very little evidence it worked. Trump did muster a crowd. A reporter scanning the crowd found a total of one Eagles logo on display:

I have seen Philadelphia Eagles fans. These do not look like Philadelphia Eagles fans:

Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

They look like Republican staffers and lobbyists who were hastily summoned to the White House to fill out the audience.

Trump attempted to sing along to “God Bless America,” but managed to get just two lines in before he obviously no longer knew the words. Trump didn’t just decide to stop singing. He picked the song back up when the chorus repeated:

Simultaneously, Sarah Huckabee Sanders told a crowd of reporters inside the White House that the administration reconciled its belief that bakers have the right to refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings with its belief that football players cannot kneel during the anthem as follows: “The president doesn’t think this is an issue simply of free speech. He thinks it’s about respecting the men and women of our military; it’s about respecting our national anthem.”

For such a brief statement, this contains an impressive quantity of evasions. First, the protests are not directed at the anthem but at police brutality, using the anthem as a point of demonstration. Second, the national anthem is an expression of patriotism, not support for the armed forces in particular. And third, even if Sanders was correct about both of the above points, once she has conceded that the issue is about a point of view — respecting the armed forces — then she has subverted her claim that it isn’t about free speech. Respecting the armed forces is also a point of view. She is demanding that players obey that view. Obviously, nobody who is trying to prevent free speech thinks what they’re doing is about free speech. They think it’s about the beliefs they’re trying to compel.

The afternoon at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was heavy on compulsory authoritarian demonstrations of ersatz nationalism, and light on genuine patriotism. The current, diseased state of the Republican Party and its Trump-era Kulturkampf was on perfect display.

#BREAKING: I’m told the entire @BPDAlerts Emergency Response Team has resigned from the team, a total of 57 officers, as a show of support for the officers who are suspended without pay after shoving Martin Gugino, 75. They are still employed, but no longer on ERT. @news4buffalo

In case you were wondering about the unmarked federal agents dotting Washington

Few sights from the nation’s protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily armed riot police around Washington, D.C., in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or names badges. Many of the apparently federal agents have refused to identify which agency they work for. “Tell us who you are, identify yourselves!” protesters demanded, as they stared down the helmeted, sunglass-wearing mostly white men outside the White House. Eagle-eyed protesters have identified some of them as belonging to Bureau of Prisons’ riot police units from Texas, but others remain a mystery.

The images of such heavily armed, military-style men in America’s capital are disconcerting, in part, because absent identifying signs of actual authority the rows of federal officers appear all-but indistinguishable from the open-carrying, white militia members cos-playing as survivalists who have gathered in other recent protests against pandemic stay-at-home orders. Some protesters have compared the anonymous armed officers to Russia’s “Little Green Men,” the soldiers-dressed-up-as-civilians who invaded and occupied western Ukraine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday demanding that federal officers identify themselves and their agency.

To understand the police forces ringing Trump and the White House it helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).